Pentaho vs. Windward Studios

As of May 2019, Pentaho is ranked 12th in Reporting Tools with 3 reviews vs Windward Studios which is ranked 3rd in Reporting Tools with 19 reviews. The top reviewer of Pentaho writes "Increases productivity and lowers costs, though should improve the construction of its dashboards". The top reviewer of Windward Studios writes "Provides us with good, reliable, dynamic document-generation performance". Pentaho is most compared with Knowage, Tableau and Microsoft BI. Windward Studios is most compared with Docmosis, SAP Crystal Reports and Ecrion EOS. See our Pentaho vs. Windward Studios report.

The quality of the layouts and designs is second to none. Windward's ability to help us generate templates, for which we can actually tag documents, is the key feature that we use.One of the features that we have found most important is that the report builder is in Word, so it was very easy to get into it... We could also use some of our existing Word templates.It's easy to create templates and reports using Microsoft Word, so we don't have to learn something new to create a template. That makes it very user-friendly... they have integrated the product with Microsoft Word. People can easily start working on it without too much training.One of the things they added in the last two or three years is PODs, Portable Object Doclets. One of our clients said they wanted to use PODs. They're a good way to make some constructs modular and keep things in one place.It's very feature-rich. You can create tables, you can create graphs, you can import pictures, and those features are also easy to use.You can use Microsoft Office as your designer interface. There is very little programming. You can have nontechnical people create reports.From an integration perspective, they provide the code for you to easily integrate with existing applications.The most valuable feature is that it provides good, dynamic document-generation performance and the documents are being generated reliably.

Logging capability is needed.Version control would be a good addition.Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention.

The reason it took us so long to get the system up and running is that the APIs could be improved a bit. It could be a little bit more interoperable with software, without having to do a lot of the heavy lifting that we had do to get it in.One thing that frustrated us a little bit is that we have to use the Office PDF generation, because the native PDF generation is always slightly different compared to the one in Office. The formatting is just a little bit off here and there... This means that we need to have Office installed on the server to be able to generate these documents via API.They could make the document creation performance faster. I'm not saying it's slow but it takes time to create the PDFs. If they could make it faster, that would be one area for improvement.Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same.Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done.About six months ago, we raised the possibility of improving the way they manage the HTML 5. Sometimes, when you insert a lot of data in the data source, you get an error because it is not managing HTML 5 features well. I believe they have addressed this in later versions of their product.The next release could benefit from a cloud-based environment.It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive)​ into data.

I'm starting to hear clients squeal about the price of their software. The cost of the software has gone up.The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user... We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable.Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me.The pricing is fair. The way that they have it priced is the Windward Designer has a price that's associated with it. Then, depending on the number of cores that you're looking for, that is the price that you pay. The more cores that you want, the more expensive it is.From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good.The only problem with the pricing of Windward is the limitation on the number of reports generated. It is costly in that sense. If you want to increase, you have to pay more, based on the number of reports generated per day. It is not the same with Crystal Reports. With the latter, you buy a license at one point in time and that's it.We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady.For what you're getting, it's an extremely good value.

Pentaho is an open source business intelligence company that provides a wide range of tools to help their customers better manage their businesses. These tools include data integration software, mining tools, dashboard applications, online analytical processing options, and more.

Pentaho has two product categories: There is the standard enterprise version. This is the product that comes directly from Pentaho itself with all of the benefits, features, and programs that come along with a paid application such us analysis services, dashboard design, and interactive reporting.

The alternative is an open source version, which the public is permitted to add to and tweak the product. This solution has its advantages, aside from the fact that it is free, in that there are many more people working on the project to improve its quality and breadth of functionality.

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